End to End

It's Memorial Day weekend, the traditional beginning of summer, and the news from Ocean City, Maryland, was that the crowds there were heavy with most people not wearing masks or maintaining social distance. 

Out on the other end of the continent, a large crowd gathered in Sacramento to protest the public health measures to contain the virus, but elsewhere things seem to remain a bit more restrained, with the pandemic dance -- six feet apart and masked -- continuing over most parts of the state, according to various reports.

Whether there are any consequences of any of this that won't be known for some time.

Improbably, there are amusing road signs as you drive into Sacramento or Ocean City noting the distance between the two cities, one of those whimsical experiences that make you wonder whether you're driving along the old Route 66 rather than the modern I-80.

Americans like to have the kind of fun when we travel.

In case you were wondering, Sacto and Ocean City are roughly 3,000 miles apart, depending on highway improvements and the like. Having spent time in both locations, I always get a kick out of seeing the signs.

They tie together two of the four states where I've been a legal resident (Michigan and Florida being the others.)

But what about this breakdown in corona-V protocols? Are the unmasked simply sick and tired of being cooped up? Do they feel invincible? Or is it a political rebellion?

IDK. But unlike the east coast, it's pretty easy to find long wide beaches in California that are not crawling with urbanites. We have crowded beaches around here too but just take Pt. Reyes National Seashore as a case in point of the availability of emptiness.

You can hike miles of sparsely populated beaches out there, holiday or no holiday.

***

Who gets sickest from this scourge seems random; statisticians do not have a fix on this one. In fact, economists don't either. This is a bad season for those who predict the future, Covid-19 is essentially unpredictable at this point.

And what's with that name? Covid-19 is an acronym that stands for coronavirus disease of 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) named it.

Personally, I like the UN agencies like WHO, FAO and UNEP, even though as a journalist I've sometimes been critical of them and their bureaucracies. In 1987, I was named by UNEP to its Global 500 Roll of Honour for environmental advocacy; that resulted from my "Circle of Poison" writings.

Most awards come with statues or certificates but that one came only with a small gold-colored pin. Very modest. No ceremonies or speeches.

Thinking about climate change on a planetary level requires modesty. No one of us can make much of a difference personally; we're dependent on each of the other billions of people alive today. From the beginning, I've suspected Covid-19 is a symptom and result of the historically rapid warming of the planet.

A few degrees of heat can incubate viruses of this sort, perhaps causing them to mutate, jump hosts, and so forth. I'm not a scientist so I'm speculating, and will wait for a verdict from those in a position to draw such conclusions.

***

Publishing at Facebook is entirely different than publishing in a newspaper or magazine was half a century ago, when I first arrived in San Francisco to help launch an alternative national magazine, SunDance.

Then it was paper, printing press, distribution companies, and display racks. There were lots of delays involved and it cost a ton of money.

Now it's a laptop, metadata and virtual friend networks. It's instantaneous, I click a button and it's out there for anyone who wants it. The costs are amortized over years -- the laptop and an Internet connection. That means the individual cost of each article to me is trivial.

When you think about it, what you and I are getting is a relationship and it is fundamentally different from the former paradigm due to the disruption of the economic model. Not to say there aren't similarities.

At SunDance and Rolling Stone in the 70s, or for "Circle of Poison" in the 80s, it was me doing the reporting and writing and thousands of people doing the reading. I had little idea what readers thought until the letters from started trickling in weeks and months later.

Today, thousands of people still do the reading but their comments, "likes", and messages appear seconds or minutes after I publish.

That feedback loop energizes me. I try to read every comment and message and respond if it seems appropriate. I'll admit that I can't entirely figure out Facebook Messenger though. Sometimes there is an actual message, other times it just redirects me to another Facebook page.

Is that the message?

One of our great Canadians, Marshall Mcluhan, author of "The Medium is the Message," would have known the answer.

For journalists and authors of my generation, it is a disconcerting pleasure to have survived this transition from the old way to the new.

Now let's see if we can survive Covid-19.

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